


whisper to a scream

by diogxnes



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Eleven | Jane Hopper Needs A Hug, Gen, Good Parent Jim "Chief" Hopper, Hurt/Comfort, Injury, Missing Scene, Parental Jim "Chief" Hopper, Protective Jim "Chief" Hopper
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2021-01-13 16:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21167615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diogxnes/pseuds/diogxnes
Summary: When Hopper finally gets to Starcourt, there's another battle to be fought. But first, and more importantly, his daughter needs him.





	whisper to a scream

Hopper’s seen El afraid, seen her in pain, more times than he cares to count. The fear was a constant companion in the beginning, soaked into every one of her movements and every glance she threw his way, still unsure if she could trust him or not. Even later, when she’d been with him a year and they thought everything was over, there were still the nightmares, the flashbacks, the way her whole body would go tense when something unexpectedly reminded her of the lab. He’s seen her dripping blood as she screws up her face and roars, seen her crash heavily to the ground, exhausted, seen her trembling and pale in the aftermath of saving the world.

He’s never seen her like this.

In the half-second that he stands there, rooted to the spot in shock and dismay as the bloody slug oozes under his boot, her face has crumpled and she’s begun to cry. The sight unfreezes whatever it is inside of him that’s paralyzed, and then he’s running to her, dropping painfully to his knees beside her and grabbing her shoulder maybe a little too roughly and saying, urgently, “What happened? What happened?”

“I—I can’t—” She’s sobbing, almost hysterical, and the words don’t come. She reaches out for him, finds his hand, squeezes it tightly. “The flay—the flayer—”

“The mind flayer,” says Mike. He’s on her other side, clutching her left hand as hard as Hopper is her right. “It got her, it grabbed onto her leg and we tried to clean up the bite, we bandaged it, Max cleaned it and we thought it was fine, but then she just collapsed and it was still inside of her, and Jonathan had to cut it out, and—” He’s rambling, speaking so quickly that his words are tripping over each other, and it takes Hopper a moment to process what he’s said.

When he does, the scene around him pieces itself together, strangely, in fragments: Jonathan, wearing gloves and holding a bloody knife and looking seconds away from bursting into tears himself; Steve, as badly beaten as Hopper as ever seen him; the rest of the kids pale and shaking and looking like the want to cry or vomit or both. And his daughter’s leg is torn open so deeply that he can see bone, oozing blackish blood and some other pungent-smelling goo that makes his stomach turn.

He pulls her against him and he can feel her press her face into his chest, shaking with agonized sobs. She lets go of Mike to fist both her hands in his shirt and he wraps his arms around her, hoping that she can’t feel the wild, panicked beating of his heart. He looks around at the others, who are just staring at the two of them in shock and horror. “Are we safe?” he demands.

No one answers, so he repeats himself. He’s aware that he’s yelling, and that probably isn’t making any of these traumatized kids feel any better, but the doesn’t feel as important right now as their immediate safety.

“_Are we safe? _This—the thing that got El, the mind flayer, is it gone?”

“It’s not gone,” says Nancy. “But I don’t think it knows we’re here.”

That isn’t as reassuring as he would like it to be, but if they aren’t being actively pursued, then at least he has time to try to patch up El before they have to do any kind of fleeing or fighting. “You,” he says, locking eyes with the only kid he doesn’t recognize. She’s wearing a uniform like Steve’s and looks relatively unharmed, though no less shaken than any of them. “You work here?”

“Yeah,” she says breathlessly, “yeah, at Scoops, with Steve.”

“You know where there’s a first aid kit?”

“Yeah, of course. Yeah, I’ll—” And then she’s running in the direction of the ice cream shop, digging for keys in the pocket of her skirt as she goes.

Against his chest, he feels El begin to slide, her grip on his shirt slackening.

“Hey, hey,” he says, alarmed. He tightens his arms around her and tries to angle his neck so that he can look into her face. “Hey, I need you to stay awake for me, alright? El? You hear me, kid?”

She mumbles something into his shirt, and though he can feel his heart rate picking up even further at how weak and disoriented she sounds, he’s relieved at least that she’s conscious enough to respond to him.

He runs a hand through her hair, trying to get her to turn her face a little so he can hear her. “What was that?”

“It _hurts,_” she whimpers, her voice shaking and high-pitched with tears.

He feels tears pricking at his own eyes, and he struggles to speak around the lump in his throat. “I know, honey,” he says, and runs a hand through her hair again, rubs her back, presses a kiss to the top of her head. It’s all so horribly inadequate that he wants to scream. He can do so many things—can take out Soviet goons with his bare fists, traipse through evil dimensions to recover lost children—but now his daughter is hurting, worse than she ever has in her life, probably, and he’s absolutely powerless to take her pain away. Still, he tries to reassure her. “I know it hurts, I know, but I’m gonna make it better, okay? We’re gonna get your leg fixed right up and you’ll be good as new, I promise. I’m gonna make it better.”

“Hop.” He turns his head to see Joyce kneeling next to him. He hadn’t noticed her approaching. There are tears on her face, but her voice is steady when she says, “Here, I’ve got the first aid kit, we need to get this disinfected and bandaged.” There’s a tube of antiseptic cream in her gloved hand and the other girl, Steve’s coworker, is standing a little behind her holding the rest of the kit.

He glances down at El’s leg again. He’s never seen a cut that looks like this one—not in Vietnam, not as a New York cop, never. He pictures the thing splattered over the bottom of his boot squirming around in there, trying to evade Jonathan’s probing fingers, and swallows hard against the vomit that rises in his throat. “Yeah,” he says, his voice coming out strangled. “Yeah, can you—?”

“Of course.” Joyce uncaps the tube and shifts slightly so that she’s better angled above El. She puts her hand lightly on El’s good leg. “This is gonna hurt, sweetheart, I’m sorry, but I need you to stay still for me. Just—just hold onto your dad and try not to move, okay?”

“Okay,” whispers El, but the moment Joyce begins to press on the wound she lets out an agonized scream and jerks away.

Hopper pulls her impossibly closer to him, cradling her head firmly against his chest to keep it still. “Don’t move, don’t move, kid, I know it hurts but we need to do this so it doesn’t get infected.” He hopes she can’t tell how badly his voice is shaking, how close he is to falling apart. Even with Sara, it was never—she was always asleep for the operations. She was in pain constantly, but it was never like this. If it had been, he isn’t sure he could have survived the memories. If something happens to El, he knows he won’t survive these ones.

“It burns!” she cries. “It burns, it burns…”

He leans down the kiss the top of her head again. “I know, sweetheart,” he says as calmly as he can manage. El doesn’t usually succumb to pain like this. Even in the worst times, she’s always willing to subject herself to hurt again and again for the sake of the people she cares about. For her to be resisting treatment, slowing down the process even when there might well be a supernatural demon heading there way at this very moment, it must be so bad that she’s almost delirious. “Here, just grab my hand, okay, squeeze it as hard as you need to, as hard as you can, and it’ll only take a few seconds.”

“Here,” says someone else next to him. He looks up from El. Max is standing next to Joyce, holding out a wooden spoon. “She bit down on this earlier, when Jonathan was cutting it out, it might help with this too.”

He reaches out wordlessly to take it from her, his chest aching when he sees the teethmarks already impressed into the handle. El takes it in her mouth, her teeth slotting perfectly into the existing ridges. “There you go, kid,” he murmurs to her. “There you go, just bite down, squeeze my hand, and—”

El’s whole body goes tense and she gives a muffled cry around the spoon, and he looks down to see that Joyce has already started to clean the wound again. He nods at her, grateful that she’s just getting it over with instead of giving El a chance to resist again, and then presses his cheek to the top of El’s head. “I’ve got you, sweetheart,” he whispers. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, it’s okay, I’ve got you, you’re gonna be okay…”

“Done,” says Joyce. Hopper looks down to see that she’s not only finished cleaning the bite but bandaged it, too, the gauzy white cloth looking eerily sterile against El’s purplish, blood-flecked skin. “All done, sweetheart, all done.”

In his arms, he feels El go limp again, and this time he knows it’s with relief. He loosens his grip on her just enough to ease her into a more comfortable position. “All done,” he repeats unnecessarily, to reassure himself as much as El.

“It should be elevated,” says the Scoops girl. When Hopper glances up at her, she almost looks startled at herself for having spoken. “I—it—it’ll help with the swelling, I think.”

“Robin’s right,” says Joyce. “We should get her off this floor, too.”

The last thing he wants is to move her, to do anything at all that will cause her more pain, but he knows they’re right. “Okay,” he sighs, and then looks back down at El. “We’re gonna have to move, kid. I’ll carry you, okay?”

El just nods, looking miserable and too exhausted to fight or even speak. He takes a deep breath, bracing himself for the wail of pain that he knows is coming, and then slides one arm under her knees to lift her. She cries out and buries her face against his chest and he moves quickly, sitting back down on the nearest bench with her propped against his side. Joyce follows, sitting down beside them and lifting El’s bandaged leg so that it rests on her lap.

“You’re doing so good, kid,” he says quietly, wrapping an arm around her chest and reaching down to hold her hand. “How are you feeling? Other than the leg?”

It’s a long while before she answers, and for a moment he panics, wondering if she’s suddenly lost consciousness. Finally, she whispers, “Dizzy.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet. Why don’t you close your eyes for a bit, yeah? Just try to rest.” He looks around at the kids, who have all moved to gather around them again. “Can someone find her some water?”

“I’ll get it,” says Nancy, and leaves to go track it down. She returns a minute later with a plastic cup with a straw, which she holds up to El’s mouth for her to take a sip. Hopper takes the cup from her hands gratefully.

The others are looking at him expectantly now, and he remembers suddenly that they’re still in the middle of a crisis. That he’s the adult, the cop, the one who’s supposed to be in charge. That there’s still a gate to be closed, and apparently another monster to fight, and ten more kids that aren’t even his own to somehow see safely through the end of the world.

“Alright,” he sighs. “Somebody tell me what we’re dealing with here.”

For the couple seconds between when he asks and when Lucas starts explaining, he lets his eyes slide shut as the exhaustion washes over him. He grants himself this one small moment of rest, sitting in silence, El a steady and comforting weight against him, Joyce close by. For a single second, he lets himself pretend that they’re anywhere else but here—that they’re safe, that they’re okay, that they’ve made it through alive. That El isn’t hurt—she’s just fallen asleep against him while watching TV.

When all this is over, he thinks, he’s going to take his daughter home and make her the biggest triple-decker Eggo extravaganza she’s ever seen. He’s going to pull out her favorite book and sit by her bed and read to her just like he used to, and he’s going to marathon all her favorite movies with her, and he’s going to let her eat way more than her fair share of the popcorn.

When all this is over, he’s never going to let her be hurt again.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! you can find me on tumblr @ diogxnes
> 
> title from the icicle works song of the same name


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